O Give thanks to the Lord of Lords: For His mercy endures for ever!

The Dream and the Drummer Boy

The Dream

When people ask me where I got the idea for my Locket Saga series, I tell them that I had a dream where a young woman and a young man were sitting on a rustic wooden bench made from a log split in half in front of a log cabin wall and he used the old line, “Haven’t I seen you before?” To that she answered, “matter of fact, I think we knew one another as children.”

After that I woke up and wondered how that might be incorporated into a story.

A Story From Parkman’s Works

A few months later, I was at the library and was reading a dusty old history book about America during the French and Indian war called Parkman’s Works. I love old history, especially stories that are not well known by the general public, so while I was reading, I discovered an incident that occurred in 1763 where a military wagon train was going to Fort Schlosser. At one point the wagon train was on a narrow wagon road sandwiched between a tall hill on one side and the two hundred foot gorge of the Niagara River.

Hostile Indians came over the hill and literally pushed the wagon train over in to the gorge. The wagons, horses and men all thrown into the gorge shattering and scattering wagons and provisions and crushing the bodies of the horses and men on the rocks below. The drummer boy also went over the cliff, but on the way down his drum strap caught on a bush and stopped his descent. He pulled himself up to safety. The only other person to survive was the scout, a Mr. Stedman who was on his horse at the front of the wagon train. When he saw the Indians, he spurred his horse to safety.

Mixing up Fiction with History

This was the start of the Locket Saga, I used the concept of “what if”. What if the drummer boy was the same boy that met the girl later? Of course, it would have to be during the American Revolution that they met again, and rather than have the scene exactly as it was in my dream, I would make them meet again in Boston and to create conflict, I would have her be a patriot and he be a British officer. After I read the book Traitors, Turncoats, and Spies, I decided to make the conflict even deeper and made Elizabeth a spy and smuggler for the Patriot cause.